Node.js Leadership Subcommittee

March 21, 2018

Present:

• Mark Hinkle, Executive Director, Node.js Board
• Sarah Novotny, Board Member, Google
• Tracy Hinds, Subcommittee Chair
• Ashley Williams, Individual Director
• William Kapke, Individual Director
• Tierney Cyren, CommComm Chair
• Todd Moore, Board Member, Node.js Chairman, IBM

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AGENDA

• Review decorum guidelinesgithub for meeting.
• Review action items from last meeting.
  • Sarah will revisit the questions regarding an individual not sponsored by a member company for selection to the Board
  • Mark and Ashley with Data collection:
    • How many people are members in each year?
    • How many voted?
    • How many are contributors?
  • Tracy follow up with Sarah for agenda building after questions are revisited
  • Tracy send notes to Andy and Sarah for meeting notes review
• Attending meetings–in end of meeting review, should we also plan a short list of who should be invited as a guest to the next call? Ex: individual collaborator or corporate paying member representative who doesn’t sit on Board with relevant interest/expertise.

REVIEW:

• We should know who makes up the individual membership base to know what role and decision-making ability they should have(data analysis on members is a work in progress to be looked at by Mark and Ashley).
• The existing individual membership program lacked a definition, a roadmap,   had significant technical challenges to the membership system(insufficient software systems), and has an unclear value to existing members.
• Further discussion on an individual not sponsored by a company having the opportunity to be selected to serve on the Board

Proceed with session.

Finish discussions from prior session (15 min)

• Do we believe that an individual who is active in the project and is not sponsored by a member company should have an opportunity to be selected to serve on the Board?
  • <alternate framing>  Should there be additional reserved seat(s) on the governing board which do not require corporate sponsorship, but are selected a different way?
    • There are 3+ distinct groups from what we’ve seen with the User Feedback Initiative. It does not seem impossible for a single individual to represent all 3. Individual contributors/core (+ distributors), module authors, end users (+operational devops)
    • A vote for representation is an option for selection because perfect representation is tough. In a vote, Interest groups help decide who helps represent their interests.
    • There is an idea that a person who contributes, has meaningful engagement with the Node.js project, and regardless of sponsorship or not should be eligible for a board position through some selection method.
    • Required dependency: define meaningful engagement.
  • Y
    • Two comments as yes. Initiatives of the project for a non-corporate-sponsored member to represent at the Board level and have action taken on. Make sure it is in alignment with what the Board is working on. Funding education and community efforts. Getting support for collaborators(especially ecosystem) through programs created and funded by Board. Diversity and inclusion work–holding leadership accountable for project goals when members behave counter to that goal. Working with proposal champions to work on initiatives instead of expecting folks to work on their own and then present it to the Board.
  • N
    • No nays were provided.

NOTES

Do we agree with the original intent of last discussion?

These seats which did not require sponsorship–do we believe that we still want this?

Is the Board just the governing portion of the foundation and the organization of money and marketing? Everything else happens out in the community or project?

This tends to be how Boards operate. Don’t usually drive initiatives outside of fundraising. Board was chartered with minimal coverage over the project to allow for freedom of project governance. There were pieces of governance that weren’t working at some point at the creation of the individual membership creation that was intended to be fixed by having representation at the Board level to be empowered to help effect change when the project was stalled with some administrative challenges.

Changing governance has historically been a long and tedious process and can be slow to change.

The Board wants to enable project work and minimize barriers. Legal and monetary risks are the biggest considerations. If the main goal is to provide resources, we need to make this easier. Communicate what the resources are. Analyze if they are providing value. Make changes to improve this. They should also be well-defined. What does being on the Board mean? What do they do?(in detail that a non-corporate-sponsor would understand) The members of the Board through their relationships can source when there is a resource problem and get people to help contribute.

When there is a need for resources on the project side, who is responsible to help?

Who is responsible for documenting this communication channel to help? The Executive Director can be a conduit for this. The Individual Membership Director cannot address some of this because it requires other roles or information is such that is isn’t supposed to be shared. We need communication out that shares what activity is happening at the Node.js Foundation. The Executive Director can do this. Helps communicate value of this role to the community. Executive summaries help as a medium to point to for leaders to communicate out appropriate level of content. Set timeframe for release. Mark will offer a monthly State of the Union for the Medium blog for the Node.js Foundation. We’ve seen it work differently in other organizations. Tends to be people who are deeply aligned with the work at hand.

Board members did not put process around the selection process. There was misalignment and expectation around what the role should look like. Pre-vetting system? In the Node.js community, there’s a perception of insiders. It could further the insider system perception. We need to come up with a way to address this.

With Kubernetes, we considered a limit on who could run for the seat or who can vote. They set the vote to anyone willing to spend $100 on the vote. You set the pool who can vote to anyone who has made a pull request or issue comment in the last year in the project. Another possibility was looking at the leadership group of the TSC and CommComm and asking them to identify 3-5 nominations with a set of criteria for selection by the Board.

From a methodical approach–We had this existing process. We don’t think it worked well for X reasons. We believe that if we change Y, we will have a different result.

Should the Board have a broader purview(ex: for inclusivity or community work)?

It has historically been contained to be respectful of the agency of the project. The prior structure was to address perceptions that existed at the time that may no longer be a need to be met. This limited scope of power for the board doesn’t seem to have percolated into the project who feel disempowered without board representation.

Provide content and Q&A opportunities for the Board and leadership of the project to educate collaborators on what they are able to do. Empower and provide agency to them for this. Board Directors at Collab Summits would be great. Blogposts.

Wrap-up: There should still be seat(s) on the Board that are non-sponsored seats.

Next meeting:

• With consensus from both Board and project leaders, we need to:

  • Define seats as non-sponsored-member directors
    • If not representative, what role?
  • Define expectations of seats
  • Define selection process
    • prevetting(Y/N)
    • if Y, define criterion that empower community with bottoms up approach(from project) to avoid perception of Board control

• Do we expect any individuals not sponsored by a member company on the board –

  • To represent a synthesized community view point in the best interests of the broader project?
  • communicate community concerns?
  • Drive consensus in the community around board topics?
  • Other expectations?
    • <comments>

• Do we believe membership election is the best method to choose those representatives?

  • Y
    • <comments>
  • N
    • <comments>
  • Alternate proposals?
    • <comments>

• Contribute to draft of proposal for future of Individual Membership from represented positions (20 minutes)

• Drive to proposal

  • Expectations (15 minutes)

• of Board

• Project expectations for Executive Director

• Expectations of Foundation + OSS Project relationship

End meeting with request for redactments. No requested redactments. Will revise for Andy’s review.

Who should be invited next meeting?(or make sure they are there because of stakeholding)

Michael Dawson Myles

ACTION ITEMS

• Follow up for Board report(Tracy, Sarah, Ashley)
• Message silver/gold members with questions about how they are feeling about representation(Mark). Do we ask individual members the same?
• Provide monthly State of the Union for Medium publication